New Products

Pages: pp. 92-c3

Replay and Store Extreme Slow-Motion Shots

I-Movix released SprintCam, a slow-motion server and software that can capture, replay, and store extreme slow-motion shots in real time, with the ability to replay 250 to 5,000 images per second in high-definition quality.

The SprintCam is designed for the sports broadcasting industry. Key features include a Photron APX RS color camera with built-in memory, Fujinon Digipower broadcast lenses, a waterproof camera control unit interfaced with SMPTE fiber-optic cables, and a SprintCam BC server with 5,000 FPS SprintCam BC Linux 64-bit software (no time limitation). The system supports EVS Advanced Video Server Protocol and is completely integrated into the broadcast network in stadiums and playgrounds.

Transcoding Software Line Expanded

Digital Rapids unveiled two releases in its Stream Transcode Manager family of distributed media transcoding software. The Stream Transcode Manager LE software offers use of Stream Transcode Manager in a lower-cost configuration tailored for those without enterprise-level requirements. The full enterprise-level Stream Transcode Manager software adds a version 1.1, with features such as server-level failover, extended database integration capabilities, and clip manipulation.

Photo Safe is a low-cost alternative to the popular Digital Foci Picture Porter Elite. Both Photo Safe and Picture Porter Elite save photos on their portable hard drives. The key difference is that Photo Safe uses a simplified operating system and lower-priced backlit LCD screen for text-only display, whereas Picture Porter Elite reportedly features a 3.6-inch color LCD screen and advanced operating system for viewing photos and playing music and movies.

Digital Content Management

Sorenson SqueezeHD XCEL uses more than 16,000 parallel computing elements to significantly accelerate key encoding tasks such as motion estimation and image transforms. Sorenson SqueezeHD XCEL works in concert with video capture cards from multiple vendors to provide effective capture and encoding in a single solution.

HD Content Transcoded for Viewing on Mobile to Ultra HD

Ateme SA released the Kyria family of HD encoders and transcoders. Kyrion offers an MPEG-4/AVC solution to target a range of DTV applications, all using Ateme technology for high picture quality and upgradability.

Kyrion includes a live video stream encoder, an offline file encoder and a transcoder, all of which use MPEG-4/AVC encoding to enable HD video to occupy less bandwidth than comparable MPEG-2 encoding. By way of example, a Kyrion-encoded HD program transmitted at 6 Mbps reportedly provides the same level of A/V quality as an MPEG-2 HD program transmitted at 19 Mbps. According to the company, Kyrion enables broadcasters to offer more HD channels to their customers without costly network infrastructure upgrades.

The Kyrion live encoders provide a wide operating scale—from 0.5 to 25 Mbps—allowing content aggregators, broadcasters, service operators, and telcos to reach their audience on any viewing device, from mobile to Ultra HD.

Using the Kyrion transcoder, it's now possible to natively support broadcast HD on media PCs or mobile devices, which are all standardized around MPEG-4. Kyrion also allows for dynamically adjusting video encoding based on overall network demand at a given point in time.

Free 3D Virtual Environment Toolkit

The Croquet Consortium—a nonprofit consortium of academic and corporate partners—announced the release of Croquet SDK 1.0, a free software toolkit for developers to use in creating 3D virtual environments. The tool's 3D virtual environments can support live discussion among collaborators in real time within a 3D virtual space. Participants can view, manipulate, and revise documents, dynamic visualizations, and large amounts of data from sources such as laboratories or supercomputing centers.

The consortium's ultimate goal is to enable the creation of a series of interconnected "Croquet worlds" where people can engage in productive collaborative interactions without the constraints of proprietary computer code. The kit provides a built-in networked telephony and a late-binding, object-oriented programming language so that multiple users can jointly create, animate, or modify 3D objects and simulations. Developers can also import and share 2D Web applications and multimedia content from their own systems.